Thai Women: Part III

Partin a
series of eight posts written back in April of 2012 during and after a trip to
Thailand to teach advanced first aid. Parts one and two.

The conflict between the ethical reality of the
instructor/student relationship and the tension of a mixed group of healthy
young people is more than half imagined, I think. The women never had any
illusions about their relationship to us, regardless of the amount of flirting
they did. I did a lot of people-watching over the time I was there and I think
that the American men were often laboring under a false impression of these
women, and a falsely exaggerated sense of their own charm. The last night the
students threw a party for us, and when we were going out to buy the beer two
of the guys were talking about the female students in the van. One of them said,
speaking about two of the girls, “I’m going to get both of those chicks naked
tonight.”

The other guy said, “Oh I can pretty much guarantee
that won’t happen.”

“No?”

“Not going to happen. I guarantee it.”

In which he confirmed a theory of mine that I had
been formulating (which I will explain in later posts). I don’t know whether he understood it the same way I did, but
he came to the same conclusion, namely that no matter how much the girls
giggled and batted their eyes and flirted and played coy, they had no intention
of going any further than that. To think that they would was a serious error on
the part of the American, an error to which all men, but sometimes it seems
especially American men, are prone. We simply don’t listen.

#TheNewChivalry

“Chivalry is only a word for that general spirit or state of mind which inspires a man to heroic and generous actions and keeps him conversant with all that is pure and beautiful in the intellectual worlds.
— Kenelm Henry Digby, “Maxims of Christian Chivalry”